Adapted from “Bring Course Concepts to Life with Cartoons” by Tojin T. Eapen, Kiran Pedada, and Ashish Sinha
Cartoons and comics are likely not the first pedagogical approach you think of for teaching the complex topics of your discipline. But these simple, humorous illustrations can cut right to the core of a concept—sparking discussion, deepening understanding, and leaving a lasting impression on students. And there are plenty of simple ways to use them in class.
It can be hard to find ready-made cartoons appropriate for the unique teaching goals of your courses, though, and most of us don’t have the time or creative talent to make our own. Generative AI can help.
Cartoons don’t just grab attention, they also provoke higher-order thinking: To get the joke, students must recognize the underlying concept being illustrated, connect it to real-world scenarios, and appreciate the irony or contradiction.
Using AI models with advanced image-generation capabilities (e.g., GPT-5 and Gemini 3), you can easily turn ideas into polished cartoons with teachable insights. Here’s how to do it—and how to then use these cartoons to enliven your teaching.
Humor in cartoons often emerges from two simple approaches.
1. Revealing a contradiction or conflict in a topic: Incongruity
| Figure 1: A cartoon highlighting the gap between the idea of financial transparency and what is actually revealed. (Source: Image generated by ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI, July 31, 2025.) |
2. Using an absurd or unexpected context for the topic: Bisociation
Source: OpenAI ChatGPT GPT-4o model on July 31, 2025
Figure 2: A visual metaphor for price anchoring, contrasting a premium option with a much cheaper alternative.
| Using cartoons in the classroom There are plenty of simple ways to bring cartoons into your teaching. Below are some of the approaches we’ve used in our own classrooms. To introduce a discussion topic. Beginning with a cartoon gives students something concrete to react to before a formal lecture. For example, one of us (Pedada) used cartoons to jump-start our 8 a.m. marketing class; they served as a gentle on-ramp to deeper material and led to increased engagement from students throughout the session. To prompt deeper analysis. Cartoons can serve as an assignment that pushes students to think critically and connect course concepts to business practice. Share a cartoon with students, then ask them to use the tools they’ve learned in class to identify the concept illustrated, explain why the situation is humorous, connect the cartoon to course frameworks, and discuss the broader real-world implications. To creatively engage students. For a low-stakes, high-energy exercise, hold a contest in which students write captions for a given cartoon (like The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest). This works best when the cartoon encourages students to synthesize an underlying business idea with an unexpected twist, showing not just that they understand the concept, but that they can apply it creatively. Our full article includes an example of this caption contest idea in practice. |
| Bringing laughter into learning The shared laughter resulting from well-timed cartoons has improved engagement, retention, and collegiality in our classrooms. Students may forget specific frameworks or formulas years after a course, but they’ll likely remember the funny image that sparked class discussion and showed why the learning mattered. |